Few
if any OA advocates will know Grossmann, but publishers surely will. Jacek Ciesielski, Vice
President Open Access at De Gruyter and CEO Versita, emailed me this comment:
“I have known Alexander for some ten years now and we have had a number of
different business relationships during his times at Wiley, Springer and De
Gruyter.”

Ciesielski
added, “You enjoy working in an industry when you enjoy working with its
people. Alexander makes me truly enjoy being an academic publisher. He is one
of the nicest and kindest people I have met in the industry. He is also someone
with a profound understanding of the research community, and of scholarly
publishing; and he is always receptive and open to new ideas and trends.”

And
it is clearly his openness to new ideas and trends, combined with frustration
at the way legacy publishers are responding to OA, which has persuaded Grossmann
to combine his new academic post with a different kind of publishing role, as
President of a privately owned OA venture called ScienceOpen. Co-founded
with Tibor
Tscheke, the new venture, says Grossmann, will feed into and help his
future research.

ScienceOpen
is a “research and publishing network” designed to allow researchers to share
scientific information, both formally by publishing articles, and informally by
reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and
updating their own papers.

Essentially,
it will offer a publishing service that will also enable post-publication peer
review, and which will be embedded in a social networking environment. A beta
site will go live next month, and submissions will start to be accepted in
November. Once the service is properly up and running researchers will be
charged around $800 to publish a full article (Although there will be no
publication fees this year).

Imprisoned

Having
had experience of both the research environment and of academic publishing, Grossmann
has an interesting perspective on OA. Above all, he understands all too well the
fear that OA has engendered in publishing houses. And now that he has left traditional publishing behind he is able to view the challenges that
scholarly publishers face more objectively than his former
colleagues still working in the industry.

Readers
must reach their own conclusions, but what struck me in what Grossmann has to
say in the Q&A that follows is that, whatever their wishes and intentions, legacy
publishers seem to be prisoners of their past — imprisoned by the business
model of academic publishing they have inherited, imprisoned by their
shareholders (where they work in a public company), but above all imprisoned by
their need to maintain the high profit levels to which scholarly publishers
have become accustomed. It is the latter that publishers believe OA now threatens
and which they so fear.

By
Grossmann’s account, while appearing to respond positively to OA, publishers
are in reality like rabbits caught in the head beams of an approaching automobile.
They are more inclined to freeze into inaction than leap into an uncertain
future. Certainly they seem unable to confront the huge changes that the new
networked environment is demanding of them. As Grossmann puts it, “I have the
impression that there is no publishing house which is either able or willing to
consider the rigorous change in their business models which would be required
to actively pursue an open access publishing concept … The yearly drop in
subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in
Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.”

Grossmann
also paints a picture of a research community struggling to move forward. With their
library budgets eaten up by “big deal” subscription contracts, research
institutions simply do not have the wherewithal to pay for Gold OA, other than
on a small scale. “As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and
traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move forward with
OA,” says Grossmann.

Whatever
the accuracy of Grossmann’s analysis, we cannot but note that it is a less
upbeat picture of the current state of Open Access than OA advocates are
inclined to paint — e.g. by SPARC’s Heather
Joseph in an earlier Q&A in this series.

Not convinced

So
what could break this seeming impasse? Green OA advocates argue that the answer is
self-evident: Researchers should continue to publish in subscription
journals and then self-archive their papers — thereby forcing publishers to
downsize their operations and embrace OA wholesale, rather than tinkering with
it in a piecemeal fashion as they are currently doing.

Grossmann,
however, is not convinced. Green OA, he suggests, should be viewed as having
been no more than “the first response of the publishing industry to the new
legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies”. What is required
today, he says, is for “one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a
significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research
content.”

In
other words, to move forward Grossmann believes it is essential to free up
money by cancelling big deals. For this reason, he says, the main focus of the
OA movement today should be on encouraging and supporting libraries to
“reallocate a part of the present budget which is spent on big deals for
subscription journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA
publications.”

Something
further is needed too, he adds. New ways of publishing and distributing research need to be
introduced — novel new services like PeerJ and
F1000, for instance. “[I]t is not
sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual
scientific disciplines,” he says. “Rather, both the visibility and acceptance
of OA concepts among the scholarly community worldwide needs to be increased.
The development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many scholarly
disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the reasons why I launched
the project.”

The Q&A begins

Q: As I
understand it, you were until recently Vice President at the scholarly
publisher De Gruyter, and you have previously worked
for Springer and for Wiley. You left De Gruyter earlier this year in order to
start your own OA publishing business ScienceOpen —
which I believe will be launched in September. What motivated you to give up a
steady job and start out on the risky path of running your own business? Was it
a desire to be your own boss and make a lot of money? What it because you do
not believe that traditional publishers are best placed to offer OA publishing
services, or was it something else?

A: Before I decided to leave De
Gruyter publishers and the traditional publishing industry altogether, I was
appointed as professor of publishing management at the University for Applied
Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

Within the
framework of that academic position, I will have the opportunity to research
and develop new ideas and concepts for the future of publishing, as well as the
responsibility to prepare students for that future. Thus I consider the new OA
project ScienceOpen as part of this exercise to explore new modes of scholarly
communication and publishing. When brainstorming ideas for a new communication
and publishing platform for scientists, I bring my experience of almost twenty
years in both active research and publishing to the table.

Over the years I was listening carefully to the authors and editors of our scientific
journals. Unfortunately one lesson I learned after more than a decade in
scholarly publishing is that fewer and fewer scientists regard publishing
houses as their partners. With the pressures and constrictions of managing a publishing
company, it became increasingly clear to me that a new concept for scholarly
publishing could be not be implemented by a slight change or some modifications
of the present business model and workflows. I had to ask myself where do I see
publishing developing in the next 10 years and where does that leave me?

Fifteen years ago I was dissatisfied with what the textbook publishing industry
had to offer academics, so I started my own small book publishing business. When I
find myself thinking “there must be a better way”, I can’t sit idly by or let
good ideas become watered down by corporate structures. I have to take the
challenge in both hands.

Of course, one
has to bear the entire risk associated with such a venture. Nevertheless, one
has the freedom to develop the concept and run the business without compromises
in terms of huge profit expectations from finance managers or lower emphasis on
service for customers and partners. This is at least the spirit of what I would
like to share with my students in Leipzig.

A: I have the impression that there
is no publishing house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous
change in their business models which would be required to actively pursue an open
access publishing concept. However, the publishers are certainly aware of the
PR value of Open Access and many are taking steps in this direction by founding
new gold Open Access journals, offering hybrid models or acquiring OA
companies. All attractive trimmings as long as the profit margins from
subscription-based journals are not threatened. Active
lobbying against OA takes place in parallel to these cosmetic offerings.

I have
been involved in many internal meetings with publishers since the early 2000s
in which copyright issues, embargo periods, or self-archiving were heavily
discussed. The Science/ Technology/Medicine (STM) sector has always been
particularly demanding, and even within a publishing house one always remains
an advocate for one’s authors — physicists were early proponents of open access
with the ArXiv preprint database for example. I
always tried to sensitize my colleagues to these demands — only a fair and
transparent handling of access issues would result in a positive and persistent
settlement between authors and publishers.

But
at complete variance to my earlier expectations, publishers continue to tighten
their rules, for instance for self-archiving and embargoing. The yearly drop in
subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in
Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.

One thing that would push authors to make the level of access to their paper a
central consideration would be for funding bodies and universities to change
their assessment standards to focus on article-level metrics rather
than journal impact factors.
There are unfortunately a lot of journals out there with only 20-30 subscribers,
but even 200-300 libraries world-wide is not that much. If authors were rated
on how often their paper is cited, they would definitely want as many people as
possible to have the chance to read it. It is telling that no major publishers
have signed the San Francisco Declaration on
Research Assessment (DORA).

The argument of low quality standards in open access journals is a standard one
in the repertoire of traditional publishers. They know the value of a
scientist’s reputation. However, the fact that a publication is considered as
poor or excellent is not associated at all with the way in which the paper has
been published: There are examples of journals which consistently contain
excellent papers published by means of both subscription based and open access
business models. Of the more than 20,000 subscription-based scholarly journals
in STM subject fields there are a significant percentage of average or
sometimes poor journals which simply means that these journals have a lower
quality barrier when accepting manuscripts for publications.

On
the other hand, there are only a few journals amongst the large volume which routinely
publish outstanding or excellent papers. Not every journal has the standard of Nature, both in the subscription based
and OA publishing models. So why should a different business model causally
result in lower quality? That statement makes no sense but it has been
continuously used in discussion about OA.

Q:
Earlier in this Q&A series publishing consultant Joe Esposito suggested that
Open Access will never be more than a niche activity. As he put it, OA will be
“a useful, marginal activity that opens up a new class of customers through the
author-pays model … OA is marginal in the sense that most research is performed
at a small number of institutions. ‘Most’ is not the same thing as ‘all.’ Those
institutions subscribe to most (not all) of the relevant materials. So by
definition the access granted by OA is marginal to what researchers at the
major institutions already have. Nothing wrong with working on the margins, but
let’s call it what it is.” I assume this is not a view you share? But what are your
expectations for OA in the long term?

A: Joe Esposito is absolutely
right when he describes the present amount of OA publication in science as marginal.
Depending on the statistics used, at present only 8.5 percent of all
research published in journals appears to be available as immediate open access
(Gold OA).

However,
having established that fact as an observation of the present status, we should
ask ourselves more frankly the reason for this. Many researches want their published
paper to become openly accessible instantaneously. They know that they could
attract more usage, and eventually get more citations, from better access to
their publication. Nevertheless, many simply do not have the funds in their
research budget to pay a publication fee. Ideally their library would be able
to shift part of their budget from subscription-based access to open access.

For
this a change in thinking about the role of the library will be necessary.
Library budgets are often completely spent on big deals with the major
publishing houses. Even mid-sized publishers often go empty-handed. The library
knows exactly how much money will be spent for a certain package of journal
content for the next forthcoming years, which is nice for them in terms of
planning accuracy. However, they have almost no opportunity to change the basis
of their subscription during the period of the contract.

For
instance, libraries cannot cancel certain journals from the deal to save money
(in fact they could ask, but they would still have to pay the same as for the
full package in most cases). Nicely for publishing houses, the consortia deal
or “big deal” model also contains a pricing cap which means the opposite of
what it sounds: it increases automatically the costs per package per year by a
certain percentage.

So
let us focus on the simple statement: as long as libraries are obliged to
manage their researchers’ budgets in “big” deals to access scientific content,
as long as publishers keep those traditional business models, OA publishing on
a larger scale than at present will be severely restricted.

Q:
There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about Green
and Gold OA. In light of recent developments (e.g. the OSTP
Memorandum, the RCUK OA policy, the
European Research Council Guidelines
on OA and the new
OA policy at the University of California) what are
the respective roles that you expect Green and Gold OA to play going forward?

A: The introduction of “Green OA” should
be considered simply as the first response of the publishing industry to the new
legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies such as the National
Institutions of Health (NIH) in the US. When it
was first introduced I expected Green OA to be an intermediate concept to be
replaced by a new business and publishing concept in general. At variance to
this expectation, the concept has become established as something which shall
exist forever.

Certainly
Green OA cannot be considered as meeting researchers’ demand for an easy way to
immediately make their research freely available to everybody who is interested
in accessing the results. All these attempts to move ahead should finally
result in a single, fair, and transparent way to open access publishing.

If
we succeed in developing and implementing a business model which simply fulfils
this sentence, we will have the key in our hands.

Q:
What about Hybrid OA, which most of those in this Q&A series have expressed
some concern about? What role do you expect to see Hybrid OA play going forward,
and why is it invariably more expensive than pure Gold OA (after all, it allows
a journal to increase the revenue it earns through “double-dipping”)?

A: I cannot see why we should
continue to formulate new models which attempt to combine the classical
subscription model with OA publishing. For a certain period of time it was
legitimate to use hybrid models in order to immediately react to the demand for
OA.

Today
the transition process has moved on and both publishers and funding
organizations should by now have had enough time to develop a new concept. However,
I do not feel that such a concept is yet in place, and the present
unsatisfactory situation will persist obviously as long as publishing houses and
their business models do not change on a broad basis.

That
said, for “middle class” subscription journals, the number of scientists
willing to pay high fees for their paper to enjoy open access status is very
low, so the problem is in many cases more a theoretical one.

Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in Europe and
internationally?

A: Worldwide there are very good,
but eventually too few examples of successful OA publications: As a physicist,
I have carefully observed for example the development of the first OA journal
in this field, the New Journal of Physics
(NJP) which was launched 15 years ago and obtained a respectable impact
factor above 4.0 in 2013. There are also some very exciting new experiments
going on such as the eLife journal
or the PeerJ and F1000 Research initiatives.

But
as long as there are only relatively few examples of successful OA journals
visible for researchers, OA will not develop the widespread acceptance it needs.
For example in China, where I regularly visited some leading institutions over the
last few years, OA is not a topic at all, despite the fact that almost 40% of
scholarly publications worldwide are expected to originate from China by the
end of this decade.

Possibly
it is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual
scientific disciplines. Rather, both the visibility and acceptance of OA
concepts among the scholarly community worldwide needs to be increased. The
development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many scholarly
disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the reasons why I launched
the project.

Q:
What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should
focus on today?A: The OA movement should uniformly
focus on supporting libraries to develop strategies to modify their budget
policies. This should result in having more money available to be spent on OA
at their institutions. At least it should be possible to reallocate a part of
the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription journals towards
OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA publications.

As
long as libraries are caught in the big deals and traditional subscription
models, we all have less chance to move forward with OA. Although this task
sounds of a technical nature, it seems to me to be the prerequisite to providing
the necessary budget for more OA publishing today and in the future.

Q:
Do you think that OA inevitably leads to conflict and disagreement between legacy
publishers and the research community? Certainly in the wake of the failed
attempt to get the Research
Works Act passed in the US there appears to be growing
disenchantment with traditional publishers amongst researchers (which you
hinted at earlier). And in the first Q&A in this series, palaeontologist Mike
Taylor argued that
legacy publishers “are not our partners, they're our exploiters”. Is it that
researchers, librarians and research funders expect more of publishers than
they can reasonably deliver? Is it that the profits of scholarly publishers
are, as critics argue, excessively high? Or is there some other reason for this
disenchantment?

A: As reported in the current market survey
of STM journals the business in 2011 was valued at around $10 plus billion, with
long-term stable growth rates and significant profit margins predicted. It is
evident that nobody involved in a profitable business like that is going to simply
withdraw any of their activities for moral or charitable reasons. As in any
other industry, participants of an open market will only react either to changes
in customer demand, or changes in the general conditions that constrain certain
business practices.

To be very open: In a free market economy, it is legitimate for entrepreneurs
or companies to achieve profits with their business. We should therefore not
focus our discussion on the question of whether a certain profit margin is too
high, which we do not do for most other industries in real life. Otherwise the
discussion will never result in a constructive dialogue between partners.
Therefore we should concentrate our common vision on the development of new business
models in publishing to reflect the needs of the market, i.e. of researchers.

The publishing industry is in an ideal position to develop such a model because
it has thousands of experienced and trained employees working for it.
Unfortunately, this industry has made no serious attempt thus far to move
toward that direction and obviously it continues with its strategy to
decelerate rather than accelerate the transition to OA. I would have expected
that one or more international publishers would have recognized a unique
opportunity rather than waiting for somebody else to take that chance, possibly
somebody else from outside the traditional publishing business.

In all this discussion, however, it is important that we do not lose sight of
who the real customers are. Researchers develop the science behind a
publication; they create a document to summarize that research; they maintain
the level of scientific quality by peer-reviewing; in many cases they provide a
final typeset version of their manuscript; they access and read the content;
and finally they decide which content they need and which they do not. In order
to enable scientists to continue doing these tasks as efficiently and
straight-forwardly as possible, a professional partner (not necessarily what is
today called a publisher) is needed, one that can provide the necessary
technical and conceptual requirements.

With
scientists doing so much of the work, it is easy to see why they might
sometimes feel that publishers are taking them for granted, as discussions
focussed on library budgets and government mandates do. And I have often heard
the sentiment that publishers are not necessarily fighting for the rights of
their authors.

Q:
The seeds of the OA movement (certainly for librarians) lie in the so-called “serials crisis”, which
is an affordability problem. It was this affordability problem that created the
accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve. Yet Esposito believes that
OA will be “additive, not substitutive”, suggesting that OA will see the costs
of disseminating research increase rather than decrease. OA advocates,
meanwhile, argue that OA will be less expensive than subscription publishing.
What are your views on the question of costs? Does cost really matter anyway?

A: The present business models of
subscription based publishing forces librarians to spend most of their budget
or all of their budget on package deals with the major publishers. Just to
illustrate the situation: For some libraries, in particular smaller libraries
which cannot afford all the journals they need, publishers offer to take their
whole budget to get access to the complete list of that publisher. As a result,
no money is left to buy the publications of other publishing houses, or other
content resources. However, those libraries accept that situation as the lesser
evil.

It
is apparent that such a situation and such a business practice is totally unacceptable
in terms of providing researchers and their institutions with the freedom and
flexibility to access the information they need for their work, and to make the
outcome of that research available for everybody worldwide working on the same
problem. I am confident that it simply requires one or a few key scholarly
institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and
fund their research content.

Fortunately,
the good news both for researchers and their institutions is that this change
will result in a
lower cost per article — as has been argued by other OA advocates. But this
will only work efficiently if the OA publication fee costs some hundred dollars
rather than several thousand.

Q:
What are your expectations for OA over the next 12 months?

A: Having carefully observed how
many new initiatives and platforms have been launched in the last 12 months
offering OA publication I would expect to see more awareness of OA publishing, amongst
both researchers and their institutions, and funding organisations.

As
with most of the changes in the economy and in industry which we have
experienced in the last few decades, a change starts smoothly and then impacts vigorously
at a certain moment in the market. You can easily imagine what I mean if you
consider the rise of the automobile at the beginning of the last century, the
tremendous success of microcomputers in the eighties and of smart phones in the
nineties, and finally the exponential growth in social networks over the last
few years.

I expect that impact very soon and it is up to participants in the scholarly
publishing business whether they experience it as a collapse of their traditional
operations or as the beginning of a new era.

Then in 2001 he
entered the scholarly publishing industry, working first at Wiley-VCH and Wiley-Blackwell (where he
was Director for Wiley’s physics publishing branch worldwide), and subsequently
at Springer (as Managing Director) and then De Gruyter (as a Vice President). During his period as a publisher Grossmann
dealt with all areas of scholarly publishing.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Alexander is an "Occam's Razor" kind of guy; but simplest does not mean easy. Having similarly started a Pubco, when I realized the legacy publisher I worked for would never significantly innovate in business models because it is "imprisoned," I appreciate the lucidity of the argument. Libraries need to shift budgets toward Gold OA, but are there other, more radical business model innovations this space could embrace?